The great Indian migration is on - no not on its highways, but in the cyberspace. WhatsApp - which totally redefined the way we while away our precious time - has now fallen out of favour among the netizens. Its ranking on the Google Play Store has nosedived, while apps like Signal and Telegram are witnessing stratospheric growth in terms of downloads.
The reason: WhatsApp plans to ease its privacy norms to help its parent Facebook mine data of its around 2 billion users across the world, and 400 million of them are from India.
This news set alarm bells and unleashed a flood of conspiracy theories, quite ironically, they are being peddled right on WhatsApp itself. The platform which had acted as a conveyor belt for fake news and tarnished many a reputation has now been hoist to its own petard (my apologies to the Bard).
Its loyal clientele - the WhatsApp uncles and aunties are furiously sending messages, memes and forwards highlighting that privacy khatre mein hai. They opine: If the new norms come into force, we will be like Big Boss participants to the Facebook/WhatsApp bosses.
WhatsApp's famed green icon, which holds a pride of a place on smartphone screens, is on a shaky ground. People may not have uninstalled it yet, but the search for alternatives have begun.
The initial favourite was Telegram, WhatsApp's poor cousin that has been around for seven years, but languishing on the side-lines. Its Russian roots (founder Pavel Durov hails from that country) evokes suspicion as the ghosts of Soviet past makes them wary.
Then some famed influencers like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Edward Snowden began pitching for Signal - an app totally unheard of among most netizens. The Google search for Signal shot up and the customary pleasantry 'Are you on WhatsApp?' soon gave way to 'Are you on Signal', with many mistaking it for traffic signal!
Soon friends and relatives started sending me messages on WhatsApp regarding the link to download Signal. It looked as weird as installing a Pepsi dispensing machine at Coca-Cola headquarters.
After I downloaded Signal from the Google Play Store, I started getting a flurry of notifications whenever my contacts signed up for Signal app. And it also exposed how inefficient I have been in managing my contact list.
More than half the notifications I got; I could not recall who they were. Most of them were added for short term necessities - our friendly neighbourhood cab driver whom I used to patronize before Uber came along, the plumber whom I used to approach while staying in another locality, the packer guy who was in charge while moving house, the car service station guy and then a couple of guys whom I had added to make Google Pay money transfers for want of cash ... the list goes on. As and when they signed up for Signal, I started getting notifications!
Meanwhile, WhatsApp started feeling the jitters. It came out with an ad blitz on the front pages of leading dailies: "WhatsApp cannot see your private messages or hear your calls and neither can Facebook: every private message, photo, video, voice message and document you send your friends, family and co-workers in one-on-one or group chats is protected by end-to-end encryption. It stays between you." It also later postponed the date of the launch of its proposed privacy norms from February to May.
However, this has no way reduced the spate of people signing up for Signal and Telegram. And the notifications on my phone keep coming!
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